Out where my mom lives the crickets and cicadas sing you to bed. I will let them do so soon, but for now I sit on the front porch in a folding chair listening and watching the fields disappear into the nighttime. The air is wet and cool, the heat finally broken, the sky a color field of blacks and purples. A last window of blue is swallowed by the clouds, a sliver of pink is all that is left of the sun. Rain begins to fall lightly, the wind rises, oak leaves tremble.
The rain is gentle now, but if it weren’t, I am in the country, where there are forests and fields and creeks to absorb its excess. Not so 500 miles south in Tennessee where yesterday floods swept houses, memories, and lives away. It is impossible to read the news like a human when the tragedies come in torrents and fires and earthquakes, some natural, others not. It is easier to be a human when it is just me with a ballpoint and something in front of me that is graspable: a line of lightning in the sky, a single firefly copying it in kind.
In the basement today I found an old journal from when I was twenty-two. The writing is free-associative, spastic, and wheel-spinning, the writer unknowable to himself, hiding on the page. It is ten years gone now and if I am still unknowable, at least I am comfortable with that, if I am hiding anything, at least I can name what it is I’m hiding, like the field in front of me, black but holding green. I will paint this night in this way only once, with hidden colors and hidden feelings: feelings for the victims of a mistaken war, feelings for a burning state, feelings for a friend who has lost someone, feelings for people I cannot share in wide release. In ten years, when I read this again, those feelings will be gone, but this night will still exist, the crickets and the cicadas playing on, the rain ending without affair.
In the morning, the field is green once more, with a plowed path through it where the tractors go. Above the tree line—also green, are brushstrokes of pink and white and blue; all of the colors becoming lighter as slowly as I write this, as inevitably too. When I was twenty-two, I wrote as if I were trying to tap syrup from the wrong kind of tree. I am not sure what has happened since then such that I can sit now so comfortably and write only about the colors I see, the small bee landing every so often on my hand, the cars passing peacefully in the middle of my sightline; if there is meaning to you in this landscape there is meaning, if there is not, there is not.
At the museum yesterday, I found a room of still lifes, small ones, of fruit bowls and cluttered desks, so many vases of flowers; if at one point these were real subjects really held, I now only hold their shadows, lingering longer on a Matisse, a pot of Geraniums on the steps of a porch. When I close this writing I will leave here for Baltimore where the porch will be a city porch on a block of brick rowhouses and tall sycamore trees. By the time I write from there, some of my friends will have evacuated New Orleans, others will be boarding up their windows. If there is any connection between my writing at twenty-two and my writing now, it is that I have never written what I see, only how I see it.
A family of deer emerge in the tractor path and cross it, disappearing once more into the tall plants. The day heats up and my forehead begins to moisten. The wind makes the soybeans move like rippling water and the moment wavers undecidedly between reality and metaphor. I leave off for now, wishing myself at forty-two well, wishing whatever porch he writes from has a nice view.